Sources and Data for US Economic History under the Gold Standard

Hanes (2013) provides a highly useful survey of the data and sources for US economic history, especially the 19th century and gold standard era until 1914, which I review below.

First, some miscellaneous facts. The US became part of the international gold standard in 1879, though it had no central bank until 1913. The US went off the gold exchange standard in 1933, and from the late 1930s/1940s shifted to a fundamentally different monetary and fiscal system.

One of these changes was that the government started to collect detailed economic data, whereas we lack such high quality data for the period before the 1940s.

Estimates for many pre-1914 economic variables are hardly definitive.

Hanes notes that we should sometimes be careful about making strict comparisons between estimates of some economic variables before the 1930s with the post-1945 data, because the two sets of data are often uneven and difficult to compare properly.

Take inflation rates. Historical price indices before the 1930s include a higher degree of “less-processed goods” or flexprice goods rather than manufactured goods (which tend to be fixprice), so that the volatility of pre-1945 inflation rates is higher than post-1945 rates, and that pre-war volatility may be a result more of the data used (Hanes 1999).

In general, pre-1914 business cycles appear to share the following traits with post-1945 cycles:

Pre-1914 recessions, however, were often marked by financial crises, bank runs or mass withdrawals of deposits and contraction of credit supply, whereas these problems have been rarer after 1945 (Hanes 2013: 119).

An interesting fact about real GDP is that fluctuations of agricultural output often have no relation to movements in the business cycle, since the weather, plant diseases, insect pests and other exogenous factors mainly influence farming output (Hanes 2013: 117).

I. Unemployment Data
From 1890, some US states began recording unemployment data in manufacturing and the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) on railroad employment (Hanes 2013: 119), but many gaps remain.

For pre-1914 unemployment data, a number of estimates have been made, as follows:

(1) Lebergott, S. 1964. Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record since 1800. McGraw-Hill, New York.

II. Real GDP
For pre-1914 real GDP, the following estimates have been made:

(1) the Kuznets-Kendrick-Gallman series:

Kuznets, Simon S. 1946. National Product since 1869. National Bureau of Economic Research, New York.

Kendrick, John W. 1961. Productivity Trends in the United States. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.

Gallman, R. E. 1966. “Gross National Product in the United States 1834–1909,” in D.S. Brady (ed.), Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States after 1800. Columbia University Press, New York.

Davis, Joseph H. 2006. “An Improved Annual Chronology of U.S. Business Cycles since the 1790s,” Journal of Economic History 66.1: 103–121.

Davis (2004) provides what is generally considered to be the best index, with many more products and services used to calculate it (Hanes 2013: 121).

Since business cycles are generally fluctuations in non-agricultural output, a manufacturing index like Davis (2004) provides a good method for comparing the volatility of pre-1914 recessions with post-1945 ones by simply comparing it with a post-1945 industrial index (Hanes 2013: 121). Such a comparison finds that fluctuations in industrial output were greater in the Gold Standard era in terms of deviations from the trend-line than after 1945, though not in order of magnitude (Hanes 2013: 121–122; cf. Davis 2006: 118, Table 4).

IV. Prices and Wages
Warren and Pearson (1932) provide an index of wholesale prices from 1720 to 1932, but this index cannot provide a good comparison with post-1945 wholesale price changes because it is biased towards prices of raw materials and less-finished goods in a way that does not reflect the composition of wholesale output in this period (Hanes 2013: 122).

Hanes (1998) provides a better wholesale price index for all periods.

Hoover (1960) and Rees (1961) provide consumer price indices for most of the later 19th century even though many goods are not covered, and Long’s (1960) index for 1880–1890 relies on limited data.

Genuinely reliable GDP price indices and deflators are not available for the pre-1914 era (Hanes 2013: 122).

V. Financial Crises
Banking panics and financial crises are studied by Wilson et al. (1990), Calomiris and Gorton (1991), and Wicker (2000), and such crises occurred in 1884, 1890, 1893, and 1907, which amplified and worsened downturns in the business cycle already under way (Hanes 2013: 125).

VI. Causes of Recessions
Davis et al. (2009) argue that a number of recessions in the pre-1914 era (such as those in 1884, 1893, 1896 and 1910) were set off by changes in the US cotton harvest.

Cotton was a major US export. When bad harvests reduced output, the US exported less, reducing the flow of gold into the US and hence causing interest rates to rise, which impacted negatively on the economy.

Hanes and Rhode (2012) also argue that a decline in European demand for American assets (either by interest rate hikes in Europe or fire sales of American assets by Europeans) was probably also a factor causing business cycles in the pre-1914 era.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Backus, David K. and Patrick J. Kehoe. 1992. “International Evidence on the Historical Properties of Business Cycles.” The American Economic Review 82.4: 864–888.

Gallman, R. E. 1966. “Gross National Product in the United States 1834–1909,” in D.S. Brady (ed.), Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States after 1800. Columbia University Press, New York.